This poem is a delightful meditation on how form emerges "spiraling from a center" of essential nature.

I look for the formsthings want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,how a thing willunfold:

Form is the expression of a more subtle foundation. Ammons is using the world of color and shape as an exercise for the awareness, a way of looking at the outer to discover the inner.

Looking at the world this way, a stillness settles on us, and we begin to see the stillness of things, even in their movement. And we start to recognize how shape and color both hide and reveal the true nature of things.

so that the birch tree whitetouched black at brancheswill stand outwind-glitteringtotally its apparent self:

Looking at the world this way, the perceptual wall between ourselves and what we witness fades away, and we become something new, bigger, open, a collective unity, "the self not mine but ours"...

not so much looking for the shapeas being availableto any shape that may besummoning itselfthrough mefrom the self not mine but ours.